CAMDEN -- It's been four years since the Center for Family Services received a $500,000 federal grant to start planning their own "Promise Neighborhood," an initiative to support children in poor neighborhoods with a goal of breaking the cycle of poverty.

Merilee Rutolo, the center's chief operating officer, said staff and community partners have worked on the initiative ever since that 2012 planning grant, even though the U.S. Department of Education hasn't released any additional grant money to support the project.

That changed Tuesday, when the department announced it was awarding $33 million to build Promise Neighborhood projects in six cities around the country.

Rutolo said the $6 million grant was promised as just the first part of a five-year, $30 million commitment from the Department of Education. The rest of the funding, however, must still get congressional approval down the road.

Education Week--Can Michigan Sustain Its Multitiered Supports?

Michigan's experiences exemplify the challenges facing states as they scale up multitiered systems of supports

Through a statewide initiative, Michigan has launched multitiered systems of supports as a framework to improve academics and behavior in more than half the state's 900 elementary and secondary schools. But educators and researchers have found that initial buy-in, financial incentives, and even early success don't guarantee schools will sustain the model for the long haul.

Multitiered systems of supports, or MTSS, are intended to address all students' academic progress and behavior in schools by providing research-backed instruction for all students in academics and social-emotional development. Students who do not progress based only on this core instruction, known as Tier 1, are assessed regularly and provided increasingly intense interventions, called Tiers 2 and 3. The framework is intended to combine elements of similar models, like response to intervention for academics or positive behavior interventions and supports for behavior.

The model "is a recipe, it's not a McDonald's 'value menu' where you go, 'I like this part and this part and this part,'" said Steve Netzel, the executive director of curriculum and staff development for the Holt public schools, a 5,600-student district south of Lansing. "It takes a while to understand it's a system and it all interacts with each other. You can't pick and choose."

As similar models are tried out in districts nationwide, Michigan's experience exemplifies the challenges of implementing systems of supports for general education students across grades, subjects, and schools.